Horst Weigmann tried to rescue his mother from the Nazis – a lesson in ethics for schoolchildren

Beate Diederichs

As part of the project “Remembering Horst Weigmann – Learning Moral Courage,” youth and adults alike are confronted with the story of the Dresden native who tried to save his mother from the grasp of the Nazis. The project was conceived in collaboration with the Gesellschaft für Christlich-Jüdische Zusammenarbeit Dresden e.V. [Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation Dresden] and the Chair of Religious Education at TU Dresden’s Institute of Catholic Theology. The project has already inspired schoolchildren on multiple occasions in their religion classes.

A story with a real dilemma

Being stuck in a dilemma is never pleasant. Every way out carries risks or is morally questionable. “For us as education specialists, however, dilemmas are a wonderful tool. When students are forced to consider what they would do in a given situation, they learn a great deal in terms of ethics,” says Monika Scheidler, Chair of Religious Education at the Institute of Catholic Theology at TUD. “Unfortunately, it is difficult to construct believable scenarios. Horst Weigmann’s story, on the other hand, is that of a real dilemma. That’s why it offers such great potential for learning in the realm of discourse ethics. During this process, the participants discuss at length the various arguments for one solution to the dilemma or the other, both of which carry their own unpleasant consequences.” Monika Scheidler is grateful to the retired electrical engineer Herbert Lappe, who shared Weigmann’s fate with her and asked that she prepare the material from an education standpoint and bring it to life for schoolchildren. Scheidler and Lappe are both members of the Society for Christian-Jewish Cooperation and had already worked together on projects in the past.

“Herbert Lappe told me about Horst Weigmann’s fate in 2016. I got the impression that he had been thinking about it for a while,” recalls Monika Scheidler. The story could be representative of numerous persecuted individuals under the Nazi regime, and yet it is unique. Horst Weigmann was born in 1920 and studied chemistry in Dresden, where he lived in an apartment with his mother, Toni Weigmann. She and her husband had divorced much earlier. As she was classified as a Jew under the Nazi race laws, the Gestapo seized her for deportation in January 1944. Horst Weigmann tried to free her from detention by impersonating Commissar Henry Schmidt, a Gestapo investigator known for his brutality. Horst’s plan fell apart at the appearance of the real Schmidt. Horst Weigmann was also arrested and died in his prison cell. Toni Weigmann was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp and, from there, was liberated by the Red Army. She survived the war and the post-war period, and died in Dresden in 1974. “The dilemma in the story is, of course, the situation in which Horst must decide: Do I try to free my mother and risk my life and hers in the process? Or do I, to put it harshly, leave her to her fate because I really have no chance of success and live on, but live with the guilt every day of not having helped her?”, says Monika Scheidler. In a classroom, she would interrupt the story at this point and ask the learners: What would you have done? She only recounts the true outcome after the discussion about Weigmann’s dilemma. The educational material for the project “Remembering Horst Weigmann – Learning Moral Courage” also includes a companion booklet for teachers with notes about the dilemma discussion. Students and graduates from her department drafted, tested and further developed the material under Monika Scheidler’s direction. It is suitable for use with teenagers from the 9^th grade, older schoolchildren or adults. It is intended for use in religion or ethics classes, but also works for history, GRW (Gemeinschaftskunde, Rechtserziehung und Wirtschaft) [social studies, legal education and economics], German or art.

Freedom to choose under difficult circumstances

Franziska Mellentin, a Catholic religion teacher at the St. Benno Gymnasium college preparatory high school in Dresden, has already worked with the material four times, with students in 10^th grade and up. “In those lessons, the issues at hand were courage and the freedom to choose under difficult circumstances,” the teacher recalls. “The story grabs you immediately. Here, you don’t just hear about the fate of Jews during the Nazi period with historical distance. Instead, you experience the fear and helplessness of the victims alongside them. That meant that our discussion had a depth that is rarely found in the classroom.” Franziska Mellentin described how inspired her students were by the topic and how well they engaged with Weigmann’s dilemma. One student expressed it this way: “What Horst did had absolutely no chance of success, but I can understand that he couldn’t have gone on living any other way.” According to the teacher, the project was an ideal method for many teens to grapple with National Socialism in the school setting.

Herbert Lappe is, of course, happy that his idea was met with such praise. The 72-year-old retired engineer and one of Toni Weigmann’s grandsons – her daughter’s son – have enjoyed a long friendship. “I knew that his grandmother had been at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. But it was only when I attended the trial of the Gestapo officer Henry Schmidt as a representative of the Dresden Jewish community that I learned that Toni Weigmann had had a son. I thought that that he deserved to be remembered,” says Herbert Lappe.

For nearly 20 years, he carried the idea with him, until two or three years ago when he realized in listening to presentations from students at the St. Benno Gymnasium on the topic “Paths of Remembrance” that young people are still interested in discussing the persecution of Jews under National Socialism interesting. “That’s why I asked Monika Scheidler as a didactic expert for help bringing the project to schools,” he explains. He imagined combining the story with playful and interactive elements so as to connect with today’s generation of students. Based on recordings of Toni Weigmann, he wrote a film script about the events, which later became a short audio story. The graphic artist Birgit Schöne has also illustrated the story as a graphic novel. Based on the audio story, Lappe has designed a smartphone app. The viewer can place the smartphone in a pair of cardboard glasses to experience the action “live.” Thanks to subsequent funding from the Foundation for Memorials in Saxony, for which Herbert Lappe is very grateful, he was able to pay his supporters, such as the graphic artist and actors, who had initially worked pro bono.

“Experiences like Franziska Mellentin’s show that the material is suitable for the classroom. Now I’d like to reach more students. It’s my goal that around a hundred schools work with Horst Weigmann’s fascinating story over the next three to five years,” says Herbert Lappe.

This article was published on May 29, 2018, in the 10/2018 Dresden Universitätsjournal. You can download the full issue as a PDF for free here. You can also order the UJ in print or as a PDF from doreen.liesch@tu-dresden.de. More information is available at universitaetsjournal.de.